A quarter of a century ago, the children's departments in publishing companies tended to occupy a position analogous to that of Harry Potter in Privet Drive. JK Rowling changed that. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
When JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was first published – 25 years ago today – nobody could have anticipated that this tale of a bespectacled boy wizard would evolve into a multimedia business encompassing Hollywood films, sellout West End plays, a lucrative studio tour business and mountains of merchandise. Potter is big bucks. And yet, it is possible that Rowling's greatest contribution to the Exchequer's coffers has not been fully recognised: her role in revitalising the whole children's publishing industry.
A quarter of a century ago, the children's departments in publishing companies tended to occupy a position analogous to that of Harry Potter in Privet Drive – though they weren't actually housed in the cupboard under the stairs, they didn't always feel like the most valued member of the family. But when Harry first received the letter summoning him to Hogwarts School, it opened up not just his world but a whole sector of publishing.
"I think children's [publishing] was in the doldrums a bit," says Tom Tivnan, managing editor of The Bookseller magazine. "The children's market as a whole was shifting around 190 million books a year in 2000 [when Pottermania was starting to reach epidemic proportions], but then, by the time the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007, it was shifting around 320 million. So that's a 70 per cent growth in those seven years, while much of the rest of the [book] market was going backwards.
I had absolutely no idea what was coming as I stood dumbstruck in that book shop, staring at my name on the spine of a published novel. Thank you to every single reader who boarded the Hogwarts Express in 1997 and stuck with Harry until the very end. What a journey it was... ⚡️❤️
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 26, 2022
"I think lots of senior people in publishing had started saying, 'We haven't been tapping into what could be a very lucrative market as much as we could'. They grew their departments, gave them more resources: everyone was on the search for the next Harry Potter. And today – this is something people don't realise – the children's book market outsells the general fiction market. Every successful children's author at the moment should thank Rowling – the platform that Harry Potter created has lifted up everyone who came after."
It was not just sales that increased, but quality, says novelist and children's book critic for the New Statesman magazine, Amanda Craig. "I think in the 1990s there had been a general downgrading of ambition and expectations for children, they were definitely being fobbed off with substandard stuff." Dominating the UK children's book charts mid-decade were US horror imports such as "that awful Goosebumps series" and the Point Horror books.
Rowling, Craig believes, brought in a "third golden age", following the likes of Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and E Nesbit in the Victorian-Edwardian era, and Roald Dahl in the 1960s. "Publishers started paying proper advances, and, at last, brilliant people like Philip Pullman, Sally Gardner, Meg Rosoff, could make a living writing children's books."
Harry Potter also revolutionised the way publishers marketed children's books. Nigel Newton, founder and CEO of Bloomsbury, who accepted Rowling's first manuscript after it had been rejected by 12 other publishers, says the initial success of the books was due to the quality of Rowling's writing rather than brilliant marketing – "but as the series went on, we felt we had to rise to the occasion of the most keenly anticipated books in living memory. I borrowed an idea from the video industry of timed releases, and for the third book we released it at 3.45pm on publication day, when the schools were done. And it worked – the papers were full of pictures of lines of children winding round bookshops."
For the later books. this was changed to midnight.
26 June 1997: Twenty-five years ago today, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published. #25YearsPhilosophersStone #25YearsOfHarryPotter pic.twitter.com/PKaDUl9FY0
— Harry Potter World (@PotterWorldUK) June 26, 2022
As the series progressed, the publicity wheezes became more elaborate: a grand launch at the Royal Albert Hall, with the children in the audience chosen by ballot; a steam train trip beginning at King's Cross and stopping at stations around the country. Other children's publishers began to be more imaginative in their marketing – and to ask for a bigger slice of the budget – to get some buzz going about their books.
Publishers also began to see children's books not just as books but also Intellectual Properties that could be monetised, as film and television companies and merchandisers began to take them more seriously. Where once TV adaptations of children's books were confined to Sunday teatime, we now have Pullman's His Dark Materials or Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses in primetime, while the new Netflix hit Heartstopper is based on Alice Oseman's graphic novel for young adults.
This is all partly due to the fact that, as Newton puts it, "Harry Potter dismantled the barrier that stopped adults from reading children's books." It was, he recalls, a colleague spotting somebody on the Tube reading a Rowling book concealed inside The Economist that gave him the idea for "special adult editions of Harry Potter that had photographic covers instead of line drawings, typography for the title and author instead of script, generally making the books look like thrillers. They really caught on".
This effect is still felt in the Young Adult market, says Tivnan. "What used to be a category for children, people under 17 say, is now mostly read by people over 20, and I think that's definitely a post-Harry Potter thing."
We are thrilled to announce that Malorie Blackman is the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize 2022.
— English PEN (@englishpen) June 21, 2022
She will receive the award at a public ceremony on 10 October in partnership with @britishlibrary #PENPinterPrizehttps://t.co/glIHyl9ilB
Rowling continues to hold her own in this crowded market: her sales have increased during the pandemic, and the 25-year-old Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was the UK's sixth-bestselling children's book of 2021. And yet, though readers still adore her, the publishing industry is not hanging out the bunting for Harry Potter's anniversary in the way it did five years ago. What's happened since 2017, of course, is that Rowling has inserted herself into the gender wars, defending the rights of biological women and enraging many trans rights activists.
"I was at the Bologna Children's Book Fair [the major event in the children's publishing calendar] this year and I was talking to foreign publishers about the anniversary, and they said, 'We're going to be very quiet about this,'" says Tivnan. "Even saying her name on social media gets publishers drawn into a debate they don't want to get into. They just want to publish books. So they're ignoring it."
"I think she's been very, very brave, but she's certainly persona non grata to the millennial generation in publishing," says Craig. "I think that generation is very frightened about being at all unpopular, so even those who disagree with the new puritanism won't speak up in support of her."
Craig recalls with irony the scene in the first Potter book in which Neville Longbottom wins the House Cup for Gryffindor after being awarded points for having the guts to stand up to his friends when he thinks they're in the wrong. "It is a message worth remembering, as are all the other things she says in her books about kindness and loyalty and tolerance."
Still, whatever you think about Rowling's politics, the debt that publishing owes her cannot be denied – even if it's going unacknowledged.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.